Under the Tuscan Sun

I picked this one up after hearing it described as the house book, the one where an American couple buys a wreck of a villa in Italy and fixes it up. That summary is true and also sells it short. Frances Mayes was already a poet and a professor in San Francisco when she and her husband Ed started looking at property around Cortona, a hill town in Tuscany near the Umbrian border. She writes like someone used to paying attention to sentences, and the book reads like a long letter from a friend who keeps getting distracted by lunch, which I mean as praise.

The structure is loose on purpose. There are chapters that follow the purchase and the restoration, chapters built around seasons and festivals, travel chapters where she and Ed leave the house for a while, and chapters that are mostly about food, with real recipes printed right in the text. It jumps around in time a little, but the spine of it runs in order: they find the place, they buy it, they repair it, they learn to live in it, and by the end Cortona has stopped being a project and started being a second home.

Finding Bramasole

The house has a name, Bramasole, which roughly means something that yearns for the sun, and Mayes falls for it fast. It sits outside the walls of Cortona with a view down over the Val di Chiana, that wide farmed valley that looks gold in late summer. When she and Ed first walk through it, the place is empty and half ruined in the way old stone houses get: cracked plaster, tired wiring, a garden gone wild, brambles over everything. The previous owners had left it shut for years. There is no heat to speak of. The bathrooms belong in a museum of bad plumbing.

What I liked about these early chapters is that Mayes does not pretend the purchase was sensible. She and Ed already had lives in California. She taught creative writing. He was involved in the house they shared there. Buying a second house across an ocean, in a language she spoke badly, with Italian property law and Italian builders waiting, was a gamble. She describes the signing process, the meetings, the papers, the strange calm of committing to something enormous because it feels right rather than because the math works. A lawyer, a geometra (a kind of surveyor-manager Italians use for building work), and a stack of documents all play their parts.

She is honest, too, about the money and the privilege. This is not a couple scraping together a deposit. They can afford the house and the work, and she never claims otherwise. That honesty helps, because the fantasy only works if you trust the narrator about the costs. She tells you the roof needs attention, the walls need rebuilding in places, the garden needs clearing before it can be anything. Then she tells you about the light in the upstairs rooms in the afternoon, and you understand why they signed anyway.

One small detail stuck with me. Under layers of whitewash in the dining room, they find traces of old fresco painting, faded color where someone long ago wanted the room to be pretty. That discovery sets the tone for the whole book. The house keeps giving them small signs that people lived well here before, and Mayes takes that as an instruction: bring it back, feed people in it, keep the rooms warm.

The restoration, with dust in everything

The middle of the book belongs to the workers. Mayes gives you their names and habits, and after a while you feel you know the crew. There are masons who rebuild stone walls the old way, a plumber with strong opinions, an electrician who vanishes and reappears on a schedule known only to him. The Polish workers who do much of the heavy labor get real attention, not just a passing mention. She learns when to bring coffee, when to stay out of the way, and when to insist on something being redone.

Restoration in Italy, at least in her telling, runs on relationships and patience. A delivery arrives three days late. A permit needs one more stamp. A wall that looked solid turns out to need far more work than anyone priced. The kitchen becomes a long saga. The bathrooms become another. She writes about tile choices and sink fittings with the same care she gives to a line of poetry, which sounds odd until you live through a renovation yourself and realize you too have opinions about grout.

The garden gets its own slow rescue. Bramasole comes with land: olive trees, cypresses, a slope of brambles hiding what used to be a vineyard, stone terraces that need rebuilding. Mayes and Ed clear, prune, plant, and replant. They put in roses and lavender and herbs near the kitchen door so cooking means stepping outside with scissors. They hire help for the heavy work and do plenty themselves. The olive harvest becomes a yearly marker. Taking their olives to the local frantoio, the mill that presses oil, and coming home with tins of green-gold oil from their own trees is one of the happiest threads in the book.

If you have ever renovated anything, these chapters will make you laugh in recognition. Dust gets into closed drawers. A job finished on Friday needs fixing on Monday. A room you planned as a study becomes storage for six months. Mayes keeps her humor through most of it, though she admits there were days she wanted to lock the gate and fly home. Ed, quieter on the page, comes across as the steady one, the person who solves the practical problem while she is still describing the light.

Learning Cortona

The best parts of the book, for me, are not the house at all. They are the town. Cortona is old, Etruscan old, with steep streets, a big square, churches, and views that make visitors stop mid-step. Mayes walks it daily when she is in residence, and she introduces you the way a neighbor would: the bar where you stand for coffee in the morning, the shops where you buy bread and cheese, the market days when the square fills with stalls.

She writes about food shopping as a social act. You do not just buy pecorino. You ask after the vendor's family, you taste, you argue lightly about which age of cheese suits the beans you plan to cook. The vegetable sellers teach her what is in season without lecturing. Artichokes in spring. Tomatoes when they actually taste like tomatoes. Chestnuts and mushrooms when the air turns. She learns to plan meals backward from the market instead of picking a recipe and hunting down ingredients.

Neighbors matter here. There is the rhythm of stopping to talk on the street, the invitations that start with a glass of wine and end at midnight, the local festivals she attends with the curiosity of a newcomer and the stamina of someone who has learned to pace herself. She describes processions, saints' days, summer concerts in the square, and the particular pleasure of being recognized by shopkeepers after a few seasons. Her Italian improves in fits and starts. She takes lessons, practices on workmen and waiters, misunderstands plenty, and keeps going. Anyone who has tried to function in a second language will recognize the mix of pride and embarrassment when a whole conversation about plumbing succeeds.

She also gives Cortona its history without turning the book into a guidebook. The Etruscans were here centuries before Rome. The town walls, the churches, the paintings in the local museum all get their moments. She visits with attention but she does not lecture. When she tells you about a fresco or a small chapel, it is usually because she stumbled on it during a walk and went back the next day with Ed, not because she set out to cover the sights.

Fair warning, though: this is an insider account written from inside a comfortable life. Mayes shops, cooks, travels, and hires help. People who work for her appear as warm characters, but the economic distance stays. She knows it, and to her credit she does not hide behind false modesty. Still, readers who want a book about struggling in Italy will not find it here. This is a book about attention and appetite, funded by two professional salaries and a lot of stored energy.

The year in food

Every season in this book has a flavor. Spring brings artichokes, peas, and the first herbs. Summer is tomatoes, basil, stone fruit, and long dinners outside while the valley glows. Autumn means mushrooms, chestnuts, new oil, and the grape harvest. Winter is for beans, hearty soups, roasts, and the fireplace. Mayes organizes much of the book around this calendar, and the recipes printed between chapters follow it too.

The recipes are not decoration. There are instructions for roast chicken with fennel and lemon, for white beans cooked with sage and good oil, for risotto, for grilled figs with cheese, for simple cakes that depend on fresh fruit rather than frosting. She explains technique the way a confident home cook talks: salt early, taste constantly, buy the better oil, do not rush the beans. Some chapters read almost like a cooking diary, with a market trip in the morning, prep in the afternoon, and friends around the table at night.

What makes the food writing work is that meals are where the house proves itself. A restored dining room means nothing until twenty people eat in it. Mayes hosts constantly: visiting children, American friends, Italian neighbors, workmen at midday, stray travelers who turn into regulars. The table gets longer, more chairs appear, someone brings wine from their own vines, someone else brings a story. The recipes are the record of those nights more than they are a manual.

I should add one criticism here, since it kept nagging me. The food chapters can stall the story. Just as the restoration reaches a tense point or a trip gets interesting, Mayes pauses for three recipes and a meditation on olive oil. If you cook, you will forgive her, because the recipes are good and the descriptions make you hungry. If you came for narrative drive, you may skim. I cooked two of the bean dishes while reading and skimmed one long passage about a dinner I will never attend. Both reactions felt intended, in a way. This is a book to live with, not to race through.

Leaving the valley

Every so often Mayes and Ed lock up Bramasole and go traveling, and these chapters widen the book beyond one town. They drive through Tuscany and Umbria, visiting hill towns, abbeys, and markets. They go south to Sicily, where the food changes, the architecture changes, and the light feels fiercer. They spend time on the coast, eat seafood, and compare the ordered green of the Val di Chiana with the blue and white of the sea towns. Rome gets a visit, with its noise and scale serving as a useful shock after months of village rhythms.

The Sicily section is the strongest of these trips. She writes about ancient temples standing in fields, about pastry shops, about fish markets where the sellers shout over piles of ice, about the layered history of Greeks and Romans and Arabs and Normans that you can taste in the food. Sweet and sour combinations, citrus, almonds, and fried things all get their due. It is also where she reflects most directly on being a foreigner in Italy. In Cortona she has a house and a routine. On the road she is a traveler again, dependent on maps and luck, and the writing sharpens.

Not every trip earns its pages. A couple of the shorter excursions read like diary entries that survived editing because the author liked the lunch. That is part of the charm and part of the problem. Mayes notices well, so even a minor town gets a good paragraph about its church or its cheese. But the book sags slightly whenever she leaves Bramasole for too long, because the central question (will this house become a home) goes quiet. I found myself eager to get back to the builders and the garden, which tells you where the book's real engine sits.

One useful thing these chapters do is put the famous film in perspective. The 2003 movie with Diane Lane borrows the title, the house, and the idea of starting over in Tuscany, then invents a divorced heroine and a string of romantic plotlines that are not in the memoir. Mayes was married, stayed married, restored the house with her husband, and wrote about markets and masons. If you loved the film and come to the book expecting that story, reset your hopes. The book is slower, calmer, and far more interested in how a place seasons a life than in whether the heroine finds a new partner.

What lasts, and who should skip it

By the last chapters, Bramasole works. The rooms are finished enough to live in, though no old house is ever truly finished. The garden produces. The olive oil has their name on it in spirit if not on the label. Friends know which bedroom is theirs. Mayes writes about winter evenings by the fire, summer lunches under the trees, mornings when fog fills the valley below and Cortona floats above it like something unmoored. The later anniversary material catches up with the house and the town years on, and the tone is grateful without being smug. They kept the place. They kept coming back. The gamble paid off in the only currency that matters to this book: a life with more flavor.

So who should read it. If you like houses, gardens, Italy, or cooking, this is an easy recommendation. If you enjoy memoirs where not much goes wrong beyond a leaking roof and a late delivery, you will be happy here. Mayes is good company. She reads widely, quotes poetry without showing off, and notices the small things: the way a mason holds a trowel, the exact green of new oil, the sound of swallows over the square at dusk.

Who should skip it. If you need a tight plot, look elsewhere. There is no villain, no deadline, no crisis bigger than a bill. The book repeats itself in places. Another market, another meal, another perfect tomato. I love a perfect tomato, but even I noticed the pattern by the final third. And if stories of comfortable Americans abroad irritate you, this one will test your patience, because Mayes never pretends to be anything else. She is a guest who stayed, a generous guest, but a guest with means.

That honesty is finally why the book endures, I think. Under the Tuscan Sun launched a shelf of imitations, many of them thinner and more staged. The original holds up because the attention is real. She learned the names of the cheeses and the workers and the winds. She wrote down the recipes she actually cooked. She admitted what she did not know. When she tells you that restoring a house taught her to live more slowly, to shop daily, to waste less, to invite more people to dinner, it lands, because you watched her learn it one room and one season at a time. You close the book wanting to fix something in your own kitchen, call a friend, and plan a trip. That is not a bad result for a memoir about plaster and beans.